Category: Leadership

Since my team (and every team at Automattic) is 100% distributed, it’s important that we meet in person a few times a year (somewhere in the world) to hang out, co-work, eat and plan together: we call these team meetups.

Two weeks ago I spent the week in La Jolla in beautiful Southern California working with my team. Each team member was asked to suggest activities/projects to work on for the meetup and I suggested we do a futurespective.

Most people are familiar with a retrospective as they’re very common in agile software development, but I’ve found futurespectives to be much less common.

A futurespective is an activity where a team can work together to create a shared vision for the future.

There’s not a huge amount of information online about how to facilitate a futurespective, so I went with this structure:

Prime directive (5 mins)

Check-in: clear the air (5 mins)

Explain the purpose of the excercise: what we are aiming to get out of this (5 mins)

Move to the future: Imagine a nirvana state (20 mins)

Coming back: Success factors that got us there (20 mins)

Now: what can we do to start achieving those success factors (20 mins)

Prime Directive

I found this prime directive online, and whilst it sounds a little cheesy, it set the tone for the excercise which is about working together for a better future together:

‘Hope and confidence come from proper involvement and a willingness to predict the unpredictable. We will fully engage on this opportunity to unite around an inclusive vision, and join hands in constructing a shared future.’ – Paulo Caroli and TC Caetano

Check in

There’s no point working on a team excercise to plan for the future if there’s something in the air, so it’s worthwhile just checking in on the team and how everyone is feeling about the current state of things.

Explaining the Purpose of the Excercise

The prime directive is a good start for this, but it’s worth explaining that the team will be brainstorming and working together to achieve a list of action items at the end of the excercise that will directly impact our future.

Move to the Future: Imagine a Nirvana State (20 mins)

This is where you start by setting the scene 12-18 months in the future where a particular milestone has been successfully achieved – this might be finishing a big project you’re working on, or having launched a new product etc. This is the nirvana state. Ask a question that you would like answered by this excercise: for example: ‘what does testing and quality look like on this day?’

Get each person to spend 10 mins writing sticky notes about the state of your particular question, what it is like, but not delving into how it is like this.

An example might be: ‘everyone is confident in every launch’ or ‘everyone knows what the right thing to work on is’.

As each person is finished we put these sticky notes on a wall and logically group them, and then vote on which are most important (each person is given typically three votes and marks three notes or groups with a sharpie).

Coming back: Success factors that got us there (20 mins)

From the first excercise you should have a list of three or four most end-states, and now we use these to brainstorm for about 10 minutes the success factors (hows) that got us to these end-states.

For example, a success factor for ‘everyone is confident in every launch’ could be ‘unit tests are super easy to write/run all the time (fast)’.

Once people have had time to write these up, we logically group them under our three or four headings on the wall so we can see these clearly.

Now: what can we do to start achieving those success factors (20 mins)

Our final activity is working out what we can do now to lead to these success factors which will get us to our end-goals. At this point you can either brainstorm again, or as a team start discussing what we can do.

If you need some structure you could use “Start Doing/Stop Doing/Keep Doing” to prompt for ideas, otherwise any format you want.

The goal here is after 20 mins have a list of action items that you can easily assign to someone knowing that these will lead to success factors and your end goals you’ve come up with as a team.

An example would be ‘ensure that 100% bugs are logged in one tool (GitHub)’ which can be assigned to someone.

Ensure someone is tasked with taking photos and writing up the findings, at least the action items and circulating these around.

Summary

The Futurespective we ran as a team was very useful as it had enough structure that enabled us to get through a lot of thought in a short amount of time. We did this on the first morning of our meetup and having this structured activity set the tone for the week as we could refer back to what we’d discussed in future activities during the week.